Water Conservation : The Journey Continues

As more people join in, this journey is destined to become a movement one day

Water is the precious elixir for all life on our planet. It is the most dynamic force of nature that has the power to shape our geography, nurture our civilizations and sustain all human activity.

My name is Sunil Sharma and understanding water resources has been my life’s passion. As a child, I remember playing with water – drawing small canals in the sand. I was fascinated to see water flow through my creations as I poured a small pitcher of water into these canals and made it drain into a small pit at the end. As a kid, sitting next to the pit seeing the water get absorbed and leaving the pit empty seemed like magic to me.

For the last three decades, each year I spend a part of the profits generated from my other business ventures into experimenting on the soil and water relationship in order to understand, develop and implement new systems for artificial ground water recharge.

In 2001, I founded SILVERON – an organization dedicated to designing and developing rainwater harvesting solutions. I have been sharing my work and experiences with people through lectures, seminars and discussions at various forums including this blog.

Water Crisis

Over the past few decades, I have seen the emergence of a water crisis – an environmental catastrophe where the lack of clean water is putting an immense economic and social burden on our rapidly urbanizing communities.

As humans, we have a tendency to put our self-interest above everything else and take actions only for our direct benefit, be it social or economic. As a society we have become unconcerned, insensitive, casual, unimaginative and even unintelligent while soon approaching a day with ‘zero’ water.

Individuals and corporations cause immense harm to the environment when they are driven by only their financial motives. From illegal tubewells that siphon off precious groundwater through the water-tanker mafia, industries dumping toxic chemical waste into our rivers and water bodies, illegal logging and mining that destroy our forests and watersheds – the threats to our environment are far too many.

Need for Change

The water crisis is a ticking time bomb that threatens our society’s existence. The need of the hour is to create a movement where we take up the cause of water conservation en masse. However, this movement like other environmental struggles requires the involvement and participation of large sections of our society.

Part of the reason why water conservation is not high on our agenda is due to the government short-term approach of treating water as simply a utility service that it needs to provide. With this approach, the government undertakes costly infrastructure projects to fetch and haul water to population centers from reservoirs far and away whilst simultaneously overlooking people’s encroachment and over utilization of water resources available to them through illegal or overused tubewells, inefficient irrigation systems etc.

To address this impending mega water crisis, the government must revisit its strategy and appropriately incentivize water conservation efforts. It is time that the government realizes that appropriate direct financial benefits like proportionate relief in state or local taxes, discounts in utility bills and/or direct financial rewards are the only means that will motivate people to adopt water conservation and rain water harvesting efforts on a large scale.

For example, people install solar panels on top of their houses not just because they provide clean energy but because the energy thus generated is “free” and has financial value when sold back into the grid. Likewise, people also invest in windmills to earn money from selling the power generated.

While the deteriorating state of our water bodies and a rapidly declining water table are putting our society on suicidal path, as individuals people often ask a simple common question – “Why should I spend money in construction of a Rain Water Harvesting structure when the rain water recharged into the ground by me does not remain in my premises and not benefit my bore well exclusively”?

This says it all but this is not the end of it.

Conservation In Action

It is SILVERON‘s commitment to keep working towards designing and developing solutions for ground water recharge by the cheapest available alternatives at places where the rain water collects.

Ground Water Recharge Through Abandoned Tubewel

As an example of this, on April 26th 2019, in far off villages in the arid state of Gujarat we are attempting to develop scores of abandoned tubewells as ground water recharge structures. These tubewells were built in 1977 at different villages to extract ground water and have been abandoned thereafter as the water table in the region declined.

Rain Water Harvesting is a site specific work and the most appropriate site specific design needs to be developed in view of the available opportunities. There are millions of abandoned dry tubewells and open wells in the country. What if we are able to recharge ground water aquifers through each one of them!

This video demonstrate that we need to be positive and optimist to succeed. We can surely turn the table if more and more people join hands and work. There is always light at the end of the tunnel and together we can march forward singing the famous lines – “we shall overcome“

We shall continue this journey, as more people join in it surely will become a movement one day…